A few days back, US President Barack Obama had revealed that his administration would prioritize efforts on energy, health care and education to not only revive economy of the United States, but also to make sure that these are investments into America’s future.
“To support that innovation, we will invest fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power; advanced bio fuels, clean coal, and more fuel-efficient cars and trucks,” Obama said.
Barack Obama’s recovery plans also includes major investments in electronic health records and new technology that can reduce errors, bring down costs, ensure privacy, and save lives.
The recently passed economic stimulus package includes more than $17 billion in funds aimed at the adoption of electronic medical records and other Healthcare IT initiatives including enterprise wide risk management. Therefore, It won’t be wrong if I expect Healthcare Industry to strategically invest in IT solutions based on Governance, Risk and Compliance. Certainly there is no bunker situation anymore.
I recently participated on different healthcare forums and discussed about the scope of GRC with respect to Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industry, I actually wanted to get myself submerged in the areas where IT can really influence and provide a real solution. I have been reading much about new innovations in Healthcare Industry and high demand of Risk control procedures from quite some time now. Every alternate day, I get a newsletter with titles like “Do more with less”, and if you visit different forums you will find a lot of people crunching about innovations required but very few of them actually discuss of an IT solution to be considered as innovative.
When we talk about Healthcare, we only think about new medical devices driving innovation but when we talk about Security, Risk, and Governance we just take it as a forced obligation whereas things are different on the ground and many would agree. Without considering risks involved in any process it’s difficult to determine the actual opportunity, and without enough controls in place you cannot achieve governance at all. If that’s the case, even your best innovation is no innovation, and in lack of proper controls and monitoring it may be exposed to potential threats and then the so called innovation may very well become the demon.
Well, I am not complaining about IT not being considered as innovation in Healthcare but somewhere we all realize IT is the backbone of almost every industry segment and when we talk about innovation we should not consider IT as a backup but put it on the core of the system.
I raised a tweet recently and got some really fascinating replies which are quite self explanatory.
Some of the reputed geeks from healthcare domain with influential positions such as Mark Reiboldt are always willing to extend their supporting hand. Mark is the author of Mark to Market and a Director at Coker Capital Partners, I asked him a straight forward question; do you think, Healthcare industry is currently open for investments in Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance initiatives?
His answer follows:
The reply from Mark is quite self explanatory, during my discussions with other experts from the Healthcare Industry, I observed some mixed response in this area, however majority of people think, this is the right time for an IT led innovation and GRC is on the front end. Even though some reports claiming GRC to be not mature enough, I do not see any reason to not invest in this area. If you don’t feed a ‘seed’ you cannot expect the ‘fruit’
Beneficial Blog! I had been simply just debating that there are plenty of screwy results at this issue you now purely replaced my personal belief. Thank you an excellent write-up. David Walson